Zach Oliva had just graduated from law school when Ohio discover a huge natural gas shale. Well, he went digging where no other lawyers were…

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom-and-pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. Here’s one of those.

[Oliva Gibbs Law Ad]

Stephen Semple:

Hey, it’s Stephen Semple with the Empire Builders Podcast. We’re doing something a little different this week. We’ve given Dave the day off, and I’ve got a really special guest with me, Zach Oliva. He’s the co-founder of the law firm Oliva Gibbs, in Texas. They’re an energy law firm. You guys, you’ve done something special in terms of what you’ve grown into. How many lawyers are you now, Zach?

Zach Oliva:

I think probably close to 60 attorneys across six offices in the U.S. It’s been a lot of fun.

Stephen Semple:

You always know you’ve grown to a size when it’s like, “I think it’s 60.”

Zach Oliva:

Yeah. Well, we’re always looking for rock stars. I know that there’s probably some offers that went out this week, not sure what the status of those are and things. We’re blessed with a really great team.

Stephen Semple:

How long have you guys been around for now? When was the firm established? How many years ago now?

Zach Oliva:

2013, actually.

Stephen Semple:

2013?

Zach Oliva:

12 years, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, that’s phenomenal. In 12 years, it has grown from yourself and Brad to basically being now 60 odd lawyers, and being in that magic-

Zach Oliva:

Yeah. Well, we started the business with another partner who has since retired.

Stephen Semple:

Okay. All right, there was three.

Zach Oliva:

I think I was 26 years old. I was reflecting on that the other day. I think I was 26, which, I was pretty dumb then, so I didn’t know how stupid of an idea. I also didn’t have kids, which makes the decision a little bit different.

Stephen Semple:

Tell me about how all of this started, because the thing that’s also interesting is the area you’ve gone after, oil and gas. Look, it’s not the glamorous space. It would be a bit of an easy one to overlook and not get excited about, and you guys have built this amazing business. As we’ve worked together, I’ve learned more and more about how it’s actually a far more interesting and innovative industry than people give it credit for. How did it all get started?

Zach Oliva:

Well, I was in law school in Ohio, where I grew up, and Ohio got just destroyed by the Great Recession. I got out of law school around 2011, and there were no jobs. I was reading the paper, and I noticed that in the paper, they kept talking about this thing called the Utica Shale and the Marcellus Shale, which, they were calling it the most prolific natural gas discovery ever in the country. It was under Ohio, so under the land, under the state of Ohio and New York, and parts of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and no law firms in Ohio at that time had an oil and gas practice. I was going to these firms, saying, “Hey, I think there’s going to be something here. I would love to come work for you, even for free, because I really think that this is going to be a big industry in Ohio. By the way, there are no big industries in Ohio anymore. If anything’s going to work, it’s going to be this one.”

None of them were interested in a kid fresh out of law school working for free, doing something that they had no idea how it worked, which, I don’t blame them at all. I had a professor who was a really bright guy, and he was really knowledgeable about the country. He was previously an advisor, I think, to the Clinton Administration, super connected in DC, and he was like, “Look, if you really want to do this, I don’t know if you know this, but Houston, Texas is the capital of oil and gas in the country, so you need to go there.”

I picked up the phone and I called about 50 law firms, and I found one in Houston that was looking for one Ohio oil and gas attorney. I flew down, met the owner of that firm at a barbecue joint, we had lunch. I flew back to Ohio and I had an offer. I moved down Thanksgiving Day, November 2011, and worked at that firm for about a year and a half, and then in 2013 started this firm. I didn’t really figure out how to grow the business until 2020, 2021, and really, most of the growth, I think, has been since 2020 and 2021.

Stephen Semple:

It was basically, you graduated from law school, and you had read about this opportunity in Ohio because of this big natural gas reserve that was just sitting there, which meant it was going to be Ohio law and whatnot that applied to all of that, and basically, tried to find a place that saw this opportunity as well. You had to go to Texas to find that, because that’s basically the capital of the oil and gas industry in the U.S., and managed to convince somebody to say, “We should hire this guy.” You were then essentially taking care of the Ohio section of the practice at that firm?

Zach Oliva:

Yeah, there were a few other attorneys there, I think one or two others who had been hired before me to work on Ohio work. And then, within a month I was back in Ohio recruiting 15 to 20 more attorneys to work at this firm, to come down and work there. That firm only had one client, so when natural gas prices in 2012 went from $14 an MCF to $2 an MCF.

Stephen Semple:

Ouch.

Zach Oliva:

That client, obviously, was not in the best financial shape. When we started this firm, the first thing that we decided to do was just diversify. Now we’ve got six offices, I think we work with clients in probably half a dozen states. I’m licensed in three states, Ohio, Texas and New Mexico. Most of the attorneys here are licensed in multiple states and are specialists in oil and gas law, and a lot of times, that carries over to other states. You have to be multi-jurisdictional to be an expert at this type of law, because you’ll work with a client in Louisiana, and their next asset might be in Texas, or their next asset might be in Mississippi or North Dakota or New Mexico or whatever. If you want to grow with your clients, you have to have that multi-jurisdictional characteristic.

Stephen Semple:

How did you and Brad meet and get started in this?

Zach Oliva:

Oh, man. He was our first hire. He came up to me at a talk that I was giving in 2012, I think, and we had a conversation. I did not think that we could afford to hire anybody at that point. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there before, but I didn’t think we could afford to hire anybody, and I was like, “Well, we should probably do this,” and that’s how we met. I was thinking the other day, that’s actually been my longest marriage.

Stephen Semple:

For background, because I love this about Brad, if I remember correctly, he was in a punk rock band when he was a kid. He did a stint in Japan.

Zach Oliva:

Not only when he was a kid, he was in a punk rock band recently, I think in the last decade, too.

Stephen Semple:

Oh, is that right? I didn’t realize that.

Zach Oliva:

Yeah, he’s got songs on Spotify. He was taught in English and Japan. A super interesting guy.

Stephen Semple:

What a geek when it comes to weird facts around law. Now, was he always that, or is that something that developed as you guys were growing the practice?

Zach Oliva:

That’s a great question. He has such a real interest in oil and gas law, and it’s almost like the energy behind that is almost infectious. He has a document that is basically a running list of every oil and gas case ever, and his comments on it.

Stephen Semple:

Which is crazy, right?

Zach Oliva:

It’s got to be thousands of pages by now. No, he’s a great oil and gas attorney, and it’s really interesting to him.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. You’ve gone through this growth, let’s face it, having 60 attorneys period puts you in the top echelon of law firms in the country. Not many firms make it to that. Certainly, there’s not going to be many in the niche that you’re in. You’ve built this super successful firm, and it started from seeing this opportunity, going after the opportunity, growing in that space. What was the turning point where all of a sudden it went from being a few people to something where you really looked at it and went, “Wow, I think we can actually grow this into this bigger multi office thing?” Was there a moment where that happened, or did it just chug along?

Zach Oliva:

Yeah, there was definitely a moment where that happened.

Dave Young:

Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

[Empire Builders Ad]

Stephen Semple:

Was there a moment where that happened, or did it just chug along?

Zach Oliva:

Yeah, there was definitely a moment where that happened, and it only took a fraction of a second. It was just when we decided to do this. When we made the decision that we were going to be the best oil and gas law firm in the country, however long it took to make that decision is how long it took. It was just a fraction of time. And then, that decision changed everything. I think it was during COVID. I don’t know if it was like this for everybody. My experience during COVID is was that it was a pretty reflective time. I had downtime, a lot of solo time, and during that time just was really thinking about, what is holding us back? What is possible? What are the limiting beliefs that are holding us back, and things like that. It was just that wanting to do more, and just making the decision to grow it purposefully was really important.

Stephen Semple:

What do you think really changed? You didn’t change your focus.

Zach Oliva:

Right.

Stephen Semple:

Knowing you, you’re a driven person, it was going to happen. What was the change that happened when you had this… because it’s interesting, when you think about it. You had this opportunity to step back from the business a little bit, from the standpoint that, generally speaking, things were different, and we weren’t interacting as much. As you said, there’s this little bit more reflective time. Was it just that you wanted to become the best? What is it that really changed in that time?

Zach Oliva:

I started to be a little bit more aware of my own limitations, in that I started to look at the relationship between time and hard work. I was like, “Well, there’s not really a relationship between hard work and success,” because if that was true, my parents would’ve been billionaires, and so would I, because I really worked hard for the first half of the firm’s life up until COVID. I was really working myself and wearing myself down. I just was like, “There’s got to be a different way to do this where maybe it’s our decision-making process, or the hiring process, or the strategy or whatever.” We decided to bring in some people who are really good at growing businesses to advise us on what to do, and that turned out to be a really great plan.

Stephen Semple:

Basically, you looked at it and said, “We’re great lawyers, but what we’re not great at is growing a law firm into a big law firm. We need help on that front.”

Zach Oliva:

Yeah. I wanted to do something. I think I was thinking about the types of people that I wanted to work with every day. During this time, I had some personal events going on. My dad was really sick from Alzheimer’s, and my best friend was really sick from stage four cancer. I was very mindful of the people that I wanted to be around, because I was like, “These are the most important people in the world to me. If I’m going to spend any time with anybody else, it’s got to be meaningful time to me, because otherwise, what am I doing? I’m just wasting my time on this earth.” I started thinking about the types of people that I wanted to work with on a day-to-day basis. You spend most of your waking hours at work. If you’re a human in this society, you spend most of your waking hours at work. It’s where you hang out, right?

Stephen Semple:

It is kind of, yeah.

Zach Oliva:

I started thinking about the types of people that I wanted to hang out with on a day-to-day basis, and I knew that the business that we had at that point was not attracting those types of people.

Stephen Semple:

Interesting.

Zach Oliva:

I said, “What kind of business would we have to build where we would attract the types of people that I would want to hang out with?” People who are creative, people who take their job seriously, are professional, they want to be the best at what they do, those are the people that inspire me, and I can get inspired by working with those people. How do we build a business that attracts people like that?

Stephen Semple:

This is so interesting.

Zach Oliva:

I was looking for more meaning.

Stephen Semple:

This is so, so interesting.

Zach Oliva:

That would be best case scenario for me, is if I could have meaning in my personal life, meaning in my professional life. In my opinion, that’s a life well lived.

Stephen Semple:

That is a life well lived, but here’s what’s so interesting about it. Most people, if they’re sitting there saying, “I’m going to 10X my business, or I’m going to do this, or I’m going to become the largest and whatnot,” the first place they go to is, who are the customers I need to attract? That’s almost always where everybody goes.

Zach Oliva:

Oh.

Stephen Semple:

You put this model on its ear and said, “Who are the people I want to work with?” I know in your heart the belief was, if I work with these people and attract these people, we’re going to attract the customers.

Zach Oliva:

That’s a great point, and I did not think about that at all. I had never even realized that until this conversation. I probably should have thought about that. It may have been a bit of business owner malpractice. I just figured… and actually, I’ll add a little bit of nuance to that. A lot of our clients I had deep personal relationships with, and still do.

Stephen Semple:

Right?

Zach Oliva:

Relationships are really important to me, and I really wanted just to get them the best quality of service that we could get them. That makes it so much easier to bring new relationships into the firm. There’s no question that they’re going to be handled well.

Stephen Semple:

Right, they’re going to be handled the way you want them handled.

Zach Oliva:

It removes so much friction, because there is a little bit of friction. I remember in the early days of the firm, when some of the folks that we had here maybe aren’t what we today would call A players, there was a little bit of friction, where you’ve got to find work to feed everyone, and to have the firm continue, and you know that maybe the lawyers could be a little bit more responsive or whatever. It creates a little bit of friction during the sales process, because you’re like, “I’m building a relationship with this person, they might not have a great experience,” et cetera. It’s wonderful for me, because on a daily basis, I get to learn from people who are excellent at what they do. We’ve created a system here where I get to learn all the time, which is really what I love to do, and I get to learn from people who are really passionate about what they do, which is awesome, because it is just more fun for me.

Stephen Semple:

Well, and here’s the interesting thing. A lot of businesses that I’ve looked at over the four years that I’ve been doing this podcast, a lot of them have started not with, “I’m building a billion-dollar business.” Most don’t start that way. Most start with, either there’s this thing they want to do that’s going to make people’s lives better or whatnot. It’s just interesting to me that you started with the people. That’s a very interesting perspective, because also what you recognized is, if you start with the people, and the people treat the customer the way we want the customer to be treated, the money will come. Yes, you want to make money. Yes, you want it to be financially successful, but instead of going after the money, you went after this with the belief that the money will come if we do these things right. We do these things right… the money’s not the goal. The money’s an outcome of doing these things.

Zach Oliva:

Well, it’s a by-product of doing these. It’s a natural by-product of doing these other things.

Stephen Semple:

But I also find it interesting, this whole idea of how COVID gave you this mental space for thinking about this. Both you and I are in the Strategic Coach… and I don’t know whether you know this story from Dan Sullivan. Dan Sullivan created the Strategic Coach program, and the origin of that was, Dan had a different consulting practice. He had this different consulting practice that did a little bit in business, did a lot in government, and ran into a bunch of problems where he literally was on the verge of bankruptcy. What he and Babs, his wife, decided, “We’re going to go away for two weeks. We’re going to disconnect.” Think about it. The world is crumbling around you and your response is, “I’m going to go on a vacation.” When they were on the vacation, they dreamt up the idea of Strategic Coach. They came back from vacation and implemented that idea, and built this unbelievably successful business.

I think sometimes in these moments of crisis, we go into the firefighting mode, because that’s what we feel like we need to do. And yet, it’s amazing how many times I’ve heard these stories of when somebody took that time and said, “No, actually, I’m going to step back and get a little bit reflective,” that what they end up coming back with is that positive, life-changing moment that they’re able to implement. Look, life is long. There’s going to be another crisis happen. Life is full of them. I think we need to think about them, but we need to take this reflective time as really powerful.

Zach Oliva:

I think, probably for the five years before COVID, I would take these trips, and it would be called a think week, or weekend or whatever. I would get a flip phone and I would go to a cabin in rural Texas.

Stephen Semple:

You just dated yourself there. You get a flip phone.

Zach Oliva:

Yeah, I still have a flip phone. I use a flip phone every weekend. I’ve been using a flip phone every weekend for seven years.

Speaker 5:

Oh, no.

Speaker 9:

What?

Speaker 5:

I was enjoying this episode.

Speaker 9:

Don’t worry. Part two is coming next week.

Speaker 5:

It better.

Dave Young: Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat juicy five star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute empire building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.